The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Loading ...

Loading ...

This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe

Climate talks are underway here in Durban, and Wingnuts have responded by ratcheting up their efforts to dodge responsibility for the climate mess by discrediting the messenger.

Their latest campaign is just as lame as previous efforts, and even more embarrassing.

It's built around 5,000 blurbs culled from more than 220,000 e-mails that were stolen two years ago from servers at the University of East Anglia. These old and ill-gotten snippets were dumped on the world last week via an obscure Russian web site, and they've been showing up across the Internet ever since – usually devoid of context but embedded instead in blobs of paranoid fluff designed to portray decades of peer-reviewed research as the product of what one blogger called "an insular cadre of climate scientists coordinating efforts to place advocacy ahead of science, stifle dissent, and conceal information which detracts from a preconceived, ideologically driven, global warming narrative."

Talk about the pot calling the dandelion black!

Despite being selectively edited to portray scientists in the worst possible light, the mails actually show them obsessing over getting things right but leery of having their private conversations picked apart by propagandists looking to cherry-pick their statements and distort their views.

The fact that these private mails have been hacked, cherry-picked, and distorted by propagandists leaves one inclined to see their point.

Let’s take just a small sampling – namely, those excerpts that were included last week in a post by the Heartland Institute’s senior fellow for environment policy, James Taylor, on this site. The first two sentences were hacked from a mail by East Anglia climatologist Phil Jones.

“I've been told that IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is above national FOI (freedom of information) Acts,” wrote Jones. “One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 (The IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report) would be to delete all emails at the end of the process”

This sounds so sinister, with apparent references to dodging FOIAs and deleting e-mails, until one considers a few points:

First, FOI laws generally apply to official communication between government officials – not to private mails, and not to early drafts of research papers. That's especially important to researchers, whose deepest fears involve publishing something that has a fundamental error in it – a fear that Wingnuts and, unfortunately, most journalists, seem immune to. They avoid this by first incubating ideas in private or in brainstorming sessions, then showing them to a few peers, testing them, refining them, and only then exposing them to the formal process of peer review. This is a grueling enough process without them having to justify their every utterance to some crackpot in the backwoods of Alabama who wants to talk about sunspots and the Apocalypse.

Granted, the legal and moral debate over the countervailing principles of transparency and privacy is a sticky one, and climate scientists are in a gray area. Their work impacts us all, but the nature of that work requires them being able to contemplate the impossible and explore strange ideas without having to present half-baked ideas as finished products.

Second, in response to the above, the IPCC has established rules of transparency – for both during and after the peer-review process.